Question: What do the following have in common? The retired people behind the counter at McDonald’s, the packaging department at Trader Joe’s, and the children in Vietnam getting paid $1 a day to make Air Jordans?
Answer: They all flaunt the dependency ratio, a construct of Western society that attempts to quantitatively calculate the ratio of able bodied employed people of working age from 15-64 vs. the presumed group of people too young (0-14) or too old (65+) to work.
Here it is in mathy terms:
Dependency Ratio = (Number of dependents / Population aged 15 to 64) x 100%
In addition to marketing demographics and calculations of disposable income, governments rely on dependency ratios to estimate the levels of government services for the younger (OB-GYN, pre-school, after school, medical vaccinations, etc.) and older (Medicare, etc.) groups that will likely be required, and for the prerequisite budgeting to be allocated.